Here’s a phrase you’ve probably heard in every marketing course, every copywriting guide, every ‘how to get clients’ thread you’ve ever fallen into:
Know your client’s pain points.
It sounds like good advice. It sounds like empathy, even — like you’re paying attention to real human need. And in the hands of a practitioner who’s already doing harm-aware work, it can be.
But let’s be honest about what it usually means in practice, and where it came from.
Where It Came From
Pain point marketing is direct response advertising dressed up in B2B language. Its logic is simple: find the thing that’s hurting, then present your product as relief. It was developed to sell diet pills and insurance and pharmaceuticals, and it works — in the narrow sense that it moves people to act from a place of fear or discomfort.
It migrated into wellness marketing because wellness marketing migrated into the mainstream internet marketing ecosystem, and nobody stopped to ask whether the model made sense for practitioners working with bodies, nervous systems, grief, and self-worth.
The framework even has a formal name: PAS — Pain, Agitate, Solve. You identify their pain. You give it a push — make it bigger, more urgent, more present. Then you offer the solution. The wellness copywriting world has been quietly uncomfortable with this for years, but the dominant advice has mostly been to soften it rather than question it.
So here we are. Somatic therapists writing copy about ‘the exhaustion you can’t shake.’ Herbalists leading with ‘are you struggling to feel like yourself again?’ Yoga teachers asking ‘what would it mean to finally feel at home in your body?’ — using the word ‘finally’ to imply she’s been failing until now.
It’s everywhere, and most of it is being written by people who genuinely care about their clients and have no idea they’re running a fear campaign.
The Mechanism
Fear marketing works by activating threat. Studies show fear-based messaging gets higher click-through rates than positive messaging — it cuts through the noise and makes inaction feel more painful than acting. That’s the whole design. Find an open wound, apply gentle pressure. Not enough to feel manipulative. Just enough to make not-acting feel risky.
Pain point copy does the same thing with softer language. ‘Are you tired of feeling like you’re not enough?’ isn’t asking a question. It’s telling her she already feels that way, and that you know it, and that you have the answer. It’s a setup dressed as a question. ‘Pain points’ is just the sanitised name for this mechanism. It makes activating fear sound like market research.
Why It Matters Especially Here
In most markets, fear marketing is ethically questionable. In body-positive wellness, it’s actively contradictory.
You cannot build a practice on the principle that bodies deserve trust and care, and then write copy that targets your client’s distrust of her own body to bring her through the door. Researchers studying ’empowerment’ advertising have noted the same structural problem at the brand level: in order to sell someone empowerment, you need them to keep believing they’re disempowered. It’s a bait and switch — and it applies just as directly to individual practitioners as it does to Dove.
The philosophy and the marketing are working against each other — and she can feel it, even if she can’t name it.
It’s also self-defeating. The clients who come to you via fear-activation are arriving already in their wound. The relationship starts from deficit. Whereas the clients who arrive because your copy spoke to something they already knew to be true — they arrive with agency. They come different.
What To Do With This
You don’t need to throw out everything you’ve written. You need a different question to ask of it.
When you read your own copy, ask: where am I locating this person? Am I starting with what’s broken, or with what’s already true?
And if you want to know what starting from truth looks like instead — that’s in last week’s post.
— Janelle / Matriarch Studio